Sophie Hossack (@receipts_sophie), Strategic Partner Manager, from Receipt Bank talks to Nick (from a rather strange location) and Dan about the huge success of Receipt Bank, how to keep supernormal growth and what a successful rebrand looks like.

Sophie, one of the early team members of Receipt Bank, talks about how they have been through acquisition and the early days when Receipt Bank was finding product market fit.

Most companies might grow at 100% a year for 2-3 years in the early days. Receipt Bank has managed to keep its growth levels at 100% year on year for nearly 10 years. Nick and Dan find out what is allowing Receipt Bank to keep up this thrilling pace.

NH: It is great to be back here today, and I'm really excited about our guest today, Dan.

DY: Yeah, this is going to be awesome. We're joined today by Sophie Hossack, distinguished guest and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Receipt Bank. Welcome to the show, Sophie.

SH: Hi, hi hi hi. Thank you very much for having me.

DY: Now we are dialing in from three locations today. Auckland, Wellington, and, where are you dialing in from, Sophie?

SH: I'm in London, today.

DY: In London. How's London today?

SH: It is dreary and gray, and it is the 29th of August, but autumn has definitely arrived.

NH: That always makes me feel so much better to hear that it's miserable in such an otherwise exciting part of the world. Well, I'm dialing in from my wardrobe in Auckland. Dan, where are you dialing in from today?

DY: I'm actually in a webinar room in the Wellington Xero HQ office. Everyone else has gone home, the cleaners have turned the lights off, and Sophie suggested that I just probably sleep here. I may as well make a night of it, I think she said.

NH: What a great idea.

DY: It's 8pm in New Zealand, 9am in the UK. Sophie and I go a long way back, don't we, Sophie?

SH: We do. We do. I think that you were one of the first people I met in the ecosystem.

DY: Gosh. I don't want to share my age here, but, yeah, we were very early on the journey together, working with Xero when you were with Receipt Bank in the early days, and I was with Vend, and we have a lot of stories and a lot of experiences from Xerocon to share, which we may get to, today.

DY: I think before we kind of launch into our discussion, I want to give you the chance, for those that don't know Receipt Bank, to tell us a little about who is Receipt Bank, and what do you guys do.

SH: So, at Receipt Bank, we're connecting accountants, bookkeepers, and small businesses. We make it really easy and simple to capture and process all the financial transactions. Primarily things like receipts, bills, invoices, credit notes, bank statements. We turn all of that data into really useful real-time information to help businesses work smarter and grow faster.

NH: Such important space in the world today, automation of data, isn't it? And so sort of transformative for the industry, these days.

SH: Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things that doesn't seem on the outside particularly glamorous, but it's so key, it's absolutely critical, that everything we're doing and to who we're working with, so we're very passionate about it.

NH: Now we mentioned a little bit about the early days of being in a startup. I was at Vend when there was just two of us, and when I left there was nearly 200. How many people are at Receipt Bank now, in the business?

SH: We think we're about 400 people. I think we're talking people across something like seven locations, I think. So it's a lot of colleagues, now. A lot of members of the team working.

DY: A lot of growth. A lot of growth. It tells how fast you're growing when you're not sure quite how many people there are in the business.

SH: I know, and I was always quite moral about this. I always wanted to make sure that I knew, I was always pretty adamant that I wanted to know exactly how many people there were, everyone's names, and that kind of thing. And now it's definitely coming to the point where it's becoming really difficult.

DY: Tell us when you joined Receipt Bank. I really would love to know, I'm sure our listeners would love to know the stories from the very early days. I know we've had a good discussion around it, I find that story really interesting. So, love to share more.

SH: I joined Alexis and Michael, who were the two co-founders of Receipt Bank. They'd set up the business in about August 2010. I then joined them in the January 2011, as their first employee here in London. And I've spent the last kind of seven and a half, seven and a bit years working with them in various locations, really. So the genesis of the company is, Alexis and Michael had worked together previously, and they're both fabulous men, they're both two of my favorite humans in the world.

SH: Michael is incredibly bright, but also absolutely hopeless at most life admin. Absolutely hopeless.

DY: I really hope Michael is listening today.

SH: I'll make sure-

DY: I don't know whether he is, but I'm going to confirm that is definitely the case.

SH: But he is. So he'd run a consulting company, and as a contractor for a number of other companies, he had a lot of expenses that he'd incurred, but he often lost them and would really struggle to keep up-to-date with his bookkeeping. So his accountant in the UK at the time put him on to a cloud G.L., and Michael thought that he'd solved the problem. Michael thought that that was going to help with the automation of the bookkeeping.

SH: In reality, it didn't. Because Michael still had these piles of paperwork. He had the receipts, the invoices, things stuck in his inbox. So he Googled, I think he's one of the very few people to ever Google, kind of, receipt-scanning technology.

DY: Wasn't a lot of keyword trending back in those days, was there?

SH: No, not high SEO traffic, that's for sure. So he found a company called Receipt Farm, Receipt Farm said if you post us your physical paper, we will digitize and extract the key information within seven working days. So Michael thought God, this sounds good. So he did that. He signed up for the trial.

SH: Seven days later he got his data back, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. And he thought he'd solved the problem. He thought this was excellent. But then he really quickly realized, that morning, that actually it hadn't solved the problem, because now he'd got an Excel spreadsheet on his desktop, and he just then copy-and-pasted all this information into his cloud G.L. So he e-mailed the guys at Receipt Farm saying, really love what you're doing, have you thought about this that and the other?

SH: They e-mailed back within 15 minutes, and they e-mailed back saying thank you very much, Mr. Wood, really appreciate your feedback, but we've decided to close down today. So then he called Alexis-

DY: Today?

SH: Yeah, pretty much literally today. Your email is the final nail.

NH: Not a typical support question, or response-

SH: No!

NH: -that you would expect in 15 minutes.

SH: Never. He called Alexis and said I think that I've found the next thing for us to work on. So they bought what Receipt Farm was then, for a pound, and then-

DY: I hope it was, was it one of those comedy checks? Those really large ones that are always like one pound. Hand it over on a stage. A bingo hall, or something. A token pound.

SH: We should recreate it, even if it wasn't.

DY: Yeah. And then that was the first thing that you scanned.

SH: Yes. So then they knew, very very quickly, right at the very beginning, that going directly to small businesses was not going to be the best route for this product. So they decided to build a product instead that was focused solely on the accountant and the bookkeeper, to help them service their small businesses. So then we spent kind of the first six months working out what it was, and how they should go about doing that.

SH: Then I joined them in the January of '11, and we went commercially live as a product in February.

NH: Fantastic. And Receipt Bank partnered with Xero pretty early on, and experienced some big growth. Were you guys sort of prepared for that growth, at the time? How did that change the company mindset, at that point?

SH: It was really, really formative. We integrated with Xero. It was our third integration. We'd integrated with two UK-based cloud GLs, and Xero was our first international one. So we integrated with Xero in, I think, May 2011. And I think the international piece was the most crucial, because pretty much within the first six months, we were getting significant calls and e-mails from accountants and bookkeepers in New Zealand, and then in Australia, asking who we were, what it was we were focusing on. Were we interesting to them?

SH: At the beginning it was manageable. It was easy to do. Michael and I spent, I don't know, six, nine months doing late-night shifts, early-morning shifts, to be able to communicate and call people in their timezone. But then very quickly it was evident that if we were going to truly want to service and work with firms across the world, we'd need to move out and actually become a global organization.

SH: That was one of the really key things. And I don't think, when the initial business plan was written up, that going global, or global expansion, certainly wasn't on that business plan.

NH: Yeah, I bet. Were you actually sent to Australia at some point?

SH: It does make me sound banished, doesn't it? Banished from the kingdom. I was. I was. As I say, there were three of us in London. I was then asked to go to New Zealand. So I made two trips to New Zealand, and then moved out there for a year at the beginning of 2013.

SH: I first moved to Auckland, and then truth be told I ate my body weight in Whittaker's chocolate and became incredibly fat. Don't regret it for a moment, though. It was excellent chocolate. And then I moved to Australia, moved to Sydney at the beginning of '14, and spent just under four years kind of building the organization there.

DY: That's awesome.

NH: Eventually the quality of tea got to you, and you decided to move back to the UK though, didn't you?

DY: To become a Whittaker's importer.

SH: Oh my gosh, that is the best idea I've heard in ages. I should do that. Yeah. I moved back to London at the end of last year. To everyone's obvious criticism of "you're doing two winters in one year, you're absolutely nuts." But yeah, I moved back to London in November last year. So it's been great. It's been really, really good. I loved my time in both Australia and New Zealand. I really, really loved it. Absolutely transformative for me as a human, as well as us as a company.

NH: And if we wind forward to today, in what we are tentatively calling the vanity metric section of the show, Receipt Bank are a Future 50 company with over sixty million V.C. funding and phenomenal growth. Is there anything you can share with us about your current growth numbers and the amazing trajectory that Receipt Bank is on today?

SH: We work with something like 25,000 accountants and bookkeepers. They then have introduced our software to around 150,000, just over 150,000 small businesses around the world. We've been growing at 100% year-on-year for the last kind of six, seven years now. So those are the type of numbers that we're up to, today.

NH: In the early stages of a startup, growing 100% year-on-year is normal. When you get to the size you're at now, it's hard to appreciate how much more difficult it gets to maintain that kind of growth, isn't it? And to grow the organization around it. Is there anything you can share around how you're able to grow the organization, how you were able to keep that growth going? What do you think are some of the secrets of your success?

SH: One of the first things that we did, and this was actually definitely Michael, Michael found an article by Paul Graham, which is called "Startups = Growth."

NH: Paul Graham is the Y Combinator head founder, wasn't he? Or one of?

SH: Yeah. And so "Startups = Growth" is all about what makes startups different. What is the definition of a startup? And it's ultimately the growth, the growth rate that you need to set and maintain. In the advice he gives, it's pick a weekly growth rate. So in the very beginning, we picked 3% a week growth rate. And as you say, that wasn't necessarily super easy, but it was definitely, because you're starting from a low base, easier to hit and maintain. And as you scale up it becomes harder.

SH: But what that does, that discipline that you build into the core of the organization right at the very beginning, means that you focus consistently on how do you optimize for that growth? How do you consistently look at that growth rate? How do you make decisions and pull levers today that you know will help shape and form the growth rate in however many weeks, or indeed months, down the line?

SH: I suppose that focus, that discipline, is something that we built in really early, which is helpful. These things don't just, very rarely I presume, happen by chance or by luck or by just waking up. They genuinely happen because you are consistently trying to optimize for them.

SH: And some of the ways I suppose we've done that is expanding in both the regions that we work in. So we've now got an office here in London, and in Sydney, Washington, D.C.; we've got sales offices in both France and in South Africa now as well. And we're expanding into Canada and Singapore.

SH: So there's definitely, how can we look at different regions, and different markets, and then how do we expand the products and the SKUs that we have in market.

NH: Just to sort of touch on your growth and your size today, I don't know if this is officially true, I wasn't around at the time and Dan wasn't either. But my sense was, having competed against Receipt Bank a number of times for add-on partner of the year, back in the early days, I felt like they had to actually change the criteria for the awards to let other people have a shot, because Receipt Bank was consistently the biggest and the fastest-growing Xero partner. And you remain today, I think what you've talked about is really investing in that partnership, investing in growth.

NH: And that's something we talk about a lot on this show, and in our business. Building an integration and a partnership is not just a case of ticking off the box in the API and then crossing your fingers. It's really about investing together for growth.

NH: I wonder if there's anything you can speak to about your experience with that.

SH: Absolutely. And as I said at the beginning, actually, or earlier on, Xero was our third integration. And we'd almost made that mistake, that belief that if you build into a platform, good things happen, with out first integration. So we built this first integration, and they had tens of thousands of small businesses in the UK, and we thought, okay, that's going to be great, that's going to be super helpful for our growth.

SH: And of course it doesn't work that way. As you say, both parties have got to really invest in all sorts of areas of the partnership. It's not solely technical. Of course a huge component of it is, so you need to make sure the experience that your products are giving together, is genuinely excellent and world-class and sophisticated and improving. So that's the first thing.

SH: Then there's definitely the internal kind of sales and marketing campaigns that you need to run between both organizations to make sure that both organizations, their teams understand how the partnership works, why it's in their best interest to talk about it, and indeed how do you do explicit external marketing campaigns, as well. So something like a Xerocon; how do you work together on something like that?

DY: Absolutely. Interestingly enough, you bring up Xerocon there, Soph. We're in the middle of Xerocon season. Or actually when this actually goes out and people actually get to listen to it, we will have had Xerocon Brisbane. And one of Houldsey's tips is you must stand out from the crowd.

NH: This is a nickname which is trying to land.

SH: Is it sticky yet?

NH: It's getting out there. I'm comfortable with it, to a point. I don't believe it will last. I never believe it's got the staying power.

DY: We will see. We will see. But he had a bunch of tips, they're up on the blog as well, so it's really good. We did a video, too. And one of those tips is, at Xerocon, you must stand out from the crowd. Now, Receipt Bank know all about that. I was I San Francisco in 2016, that was the Xerocon that I was at, actually Nick might have been there as well.

DY: You see the Receipt Bank exhibitor booth, and it's just a sea of orange.

SH: Subtle. Subtle, quiet color.

DY: It's subtle. Accountants must love it, I don't know. I don't know what it is about orange, but it was pretty cool to see. Now, are you the genesis of this, Sophie?

SH: I wish that I could claim that I was. No, is the short answer. Actually, Nick has something to do with it, but I don't think he realizes it. I don't think you know this, Nick. Yeah.

DY: Do you mean Houldsey?

SH: Houldsey. Exactly. Credit it to Houldsey. Actually, our first iteration of the product and the brand was a sand, beige color. Sand and black. And anybody who was using Receipt Bank pre-2014 will know that color well. It wasn't the most compelling of colors. So we knew that when we changed the UI, that we wanted to change the branding color, as well. And we'd always been huge admirers of Vend, in general, and then Vend's green. And the power of that green color, and the complete ownership and domination of using that green.

SH: Like, nobody else could use green, because Vend had absolutely cracked it. And I just loved that, and we loved that. So Michael and I had been discussing what color to pick, and I had been very adamant that I wanted a really bright color. I wanted pink. Exactly. Didn't get very far.

DY: Also unique. Also unique, in the ecosystem.

SH: I wanted pink, didn't get it. Michael had suggested yellow, and at the eWAY, the payment gateway in Australia, was yellow, and they'd completely dominated the yellow color. So we agreed that wouldn't be a great color to choose.

SH: And then we landed on orange, because nobody else had really used it, yet. And as we continued to use it, the more and more it became, as you say, this sea of orange, this army of orange, this bright, bold color. And I genuinely think it's one of the best things we've done. Because it does stand out. And it's also such a bright and vibrant color, as well.

NH: When we're at our roadshow, I was running an event on marketing, and I asked the crowd, if I say the color orange, who do you think of? And everybody said Receipt Bank, so it's clearly worked.

SH: That's awesome.

DY: Actually, I think something's dawned on me just now. We have this amazing graphic that we put up at Xerocon, we'll be doing it again this year, which shows all of the partners in the ecosystem on a single screen. And it's the most amazing kind of rainbow or color palette. And as you describe it, I actually think it was almost a self-selecting mechanism, where everybody was trying to position and differentiate from each other, and then creating an actual kind of pure color chart, as a consequence.

NH: We're actually aiming, along with the blue, we're aiming to own the beard sort of vibe.

SH: Oh, yeah. You do a good job of that, you do a good job of that.

NH: Salt-and-pepper, I believe that color is called, Dan. At my age.

NH: One of our questions is, and we're talking about partnerships, I guess, and we've touched on it a bit. What do you look for in a partnership? What does Receipt Bank look for in a strategic partnership?

SH: We integrate with around 12 different platforms and products at the moment. The majority of those are cloud general ledgers. So really working hand-in-glove with other products and platforms, and how to service accountants and bookkeepers and help them service their small business clients. So that's really, really key. Identifying the mutual customer, and the definition of your mutual customer, I think, is really important.

SH: The dexterity with which you can build and develop and improve upon the integration, that's really important. Not only does that help shape and define the experience you're giving to that customer, it also ensures the teams really enjoy the process of working on it together.

SH: And then there are some other really interesting partners that we're starting to really work with, which fall out of that bracket. Fall out of the bracket of general ledger and accounting software. So somebody like the team at Gusto. We integrate with Gusto to help consolidate the time it takes to repay expenses, reimbursable expenses, and bulk that together and attach that to the payroll that's then paid out each kind of fortnight or month, depending.

SH: So looking at which region or segment you can really work hand-in-glove in, that's really important.

NH: Absolutely. I guess taking a look back now, bit of a retro, what's the one thing that you've done at Receipt Bank that you would have done immediately if you were to start over again? Like, what's been your greatest move, do you think?

SH: That's a really good question. I think our approach to knowing to integrate early on was something that we did do early on, and that we would do again, right from the very beginning. So, knowing how to integrate, defining, then, how to partner, and working hand-in-glove together, that's been absolutely crucial, it's been crucial to our success as a company, and our continued success.

SH: It's also been really, really key in helping the accountants and bookkeepers that we work with. That is one thing that we did do, that we would do again. The thing that we didn't do early on, that if we were able to do again in this current climate, we would do again, or I would say we should do again, is definitely our pricing, and the way that we view pricing, particularly at the firm level. That's been really important.

NH: Cool. So Sophie, you mentioned a little bit there, talking about working with accounting partners, and I think a large part of the success of Receipt Bank, and certainly a large part of our successful partnership together has really been really understanding the needs of the accounting partners, and helping them on their digital journey.

NH: We've talked about this a lot, that Receipt Bank's such a strong proposition for accounting firms that are trying to move into the cloud. What's your advice for other startups, or other businesses, about how to work with accountants as channel? Because they're quite unique, aren't they, as a sales channel. They're not like your typical resellers.

SH: Yeah. Actually we never, ever viewed them as a reseller. We've never thought that accountants and bookkeepers were a reseller channel for us. So we've always tried to focus our attention on, as you say, the needs of the firm, what do they need to be able to make bookkeeping, because that's the area, obviously, we specialize in, bookkeeping efficient and profitable.

SH: One thing we used to do in the past was, we just deployed our sheer curiosity and enthusiasm and imagination around what features and products these firms wanted and indeed needed. And that was brilliant, lots of things got unearthed. When we first went out to New Zealand, the first meeting Michael and I actually had together was with Mel Morris, who had a bookkeeping firm in Christchurch. And that was really fascinating.

SH: So Mel was the first bookkeeper that we spoke to, and she then was so helpful in helping us to define and redefine that segment of customer who would be using our product, different from an accounting firm. In the early days it was all about that, as I say, curiosity and imagination. Thankfully we have become a lot more sophisticated and professional, and indeed refined around this process.

SH: So we've got a whole CX team who have researchers looking at the different regions, the different segments, the different type of firms. So in the U.S. the tax-prep firms, for example. In Australia, the bookkeeping firms. And really working out, for those different firms and companies, how it is that they use us today, and indeed how it is that they'll be using us in the years to come.

SH: So we've definitely refined our approach to building, I suppose.

NH: I'd love to continue the discussion around the years to come and the future. We've been talking to some large platforms on this show, and some really key partners. Some of those businesses, like Shopify or Slack, are reasonably young products themselves, they've only been around for eight to ten years, and they started out maybe solving one thing and doing it quite well, but over time growing into a platform. It feels like there's been a lot of development in the industry, but we're really at the early stages of what's to come.

NH: If we apply that to accounting, there's a lot of talk about disruption and change through automation. Certainly in the early days the Mel Morrises of this world really embraced it and came on board. But there's a lot of businesses, huge numbers of businesses, including accounting firms, who aren't.

NH: What do you think it's going to look like in the next five to ten years? Do you think people will come on the journey? What are the positives, what are the challenges, with that? From your experience of the landscape.

SH: Definitely. I think the journey might take longer than you anticipate. I think, at the same time, and simultaneously, they'll come quicker, actually. So there are times where I've thought moves might have been made in the industry that were quicker than they are today. But actually there are some things now which are, you can't imagine it not working that way.

SH: An example of that is when we created the mobile apps for the iPhone, that was in February, March of 2011, we genuinely couldn't really pay firms to introduce the app to their clients. You know? We tried, in one way or another, we tried to white-label it, brand it in their ways, and really tried to incentivize the firm to trust the mobile app, to deploy it within their client base. And very few, very very few, I can name them actually, the ones who did choose to use it.

SH: Now, today, using your mobile phone to take a photograph is completely normalized. And it seems peculiar that that was ever such a barrier to adoption. So there are things that I think are going to be surprising about where the adoption happens more quickly, and indeed which regions. So the lens that we've often viewed the world is very, kind of, commonwealth countries, or English-speaking countries, and I think we're going to be, over the next couple of years, really pleasantly surprised about which regions are actually the ones which become the accelerator for card adoption.

NH: I'm still disappointed that I have to pay with cash in some places. I can't believe that I'm not just paying with a microchip in my brain, by thinking about it. When did this happen?

SH: I don't mind paying for cash so much, I don't like it, but I really dislike being charged a surcharge for paying by card. That I still think is absolutely crackers.

DY: I hate it, too. That grinds my gears, big-time. Sorry.

NH: I'm upset, now.

DY: It's nearly 9pm.

NH: Tell us your problems, Dan. Tell us what's on your mind.

NH: Yeah, but you're right, like the things that- we'll be thinking about self-driving cars for a long time, then suddenly we'll just be in them. I remember the same thing with video calling. When it first came out in 2003, it was weird. I'd been waiting for it since The Jetsons, and then it finally arrived, and nobody wanted to use it because it was creepy. And it was expensive. And some point in the ten years that followed, it just became quite normal, and now I spend most of my day staring at a screen on a video call. It's just a part of the behavior. I think these things creep up on us until we realize that actually it's everyday practice, now.

SH: And it's happening across so many different things, which I think is fascinating. I'm now at the stage where lots of my friends are getting married, and it's now completely not peculiar for them to have met their partners using a dating app. The idea that dating has completely shifted and changed as well, and using technology has normalized the way that you can meet people, I find fascinating.

SH: So whether it's business or social or whatever it is, there's a tipping point where you don't even, as you say, realize that it's become apparent.

NH: Here we are, recording a podcast from three locations, including a wardrobe. It's an exciting time to be alive, Sophie and Dan, it's an exciting time to be alive.

SH: Dan, does that mean that you're the lion, I'm the witch, and Nick's the Wardrobe?

NH: Roar.

DY: I think it does, I think it does.

DY: So, one final question from me, Soph. So what does success look like, for Receipt Bank in the next sort of months and years?

SH: There are, you know, hundreds and thousands of accounting, bookkeeping firms globally. Who are servicing and looking after tens of millions of small businesses. So the opportunity to work with that scale of number is just massive. There are a lot of people who, every day, need technology to help them. Success really is about servicing that need, and being true to who it is that we're working with, and what it is that we're building for them. To help them kind of get that data, and get that financial information, quickly, accurately, and indeed effortlessly.

DY: Brilliant. Now, I did say that was my last question, but actually we're going to jump into the rapid-fire round now.

NH: My favorite segment. Everyone who have subscribed, or have listened, to the podcast before, will know exactly what is coming up.

SH: I'm really nervous.

DY: You should be sweating. Right. Now.

SH: I am! I am!

DY: These questions will be completely, you'll be completely oblivious to what I'm going to ask you, of course.

SH: Okay.

DY: Okay, so I'll go first, and then we'll alternate, Nick and I. Five questions, here we go.

DY: Gif, or Gif

SH: Gif.

NH: Human, or dancer?

SH: Dancer.

DY: I'm not sure I even understand the question.

SH: I could sing it. No, actually, don't make me sing.

DY: Okay, here's one. Narnia, or Middle-Earth?

SH: Narnia, yeah.

NH: Keyboard, or mouse?

SH: Keyboard?

DY: Trackpad or mouse?

SH: Ooh, trackpad.

DY: Trackpad.

NH: And finally, favorite emoji?

SH: I like the trumpets, you know? I really like the trumpet. ... Exactly.

NH: I think we've got our new outro, stinger.

DY: I like that. Awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure as always, Soph. Thanks a lot for joining us. Now, for those of you who are listening, if you want to know more about Receipt Bank, head over to receipt-bank.com. And similarly, if you are keep to find out about Xero, or our API and developer program, head to developer.xero.com. ...

NH: I think that's us. Thank you so much for joining, Sophie. I always love to have a chat. This has been a lot of fun. We'll see you again soon, in person.